I will need to get a laptop in the foreseeable future, and I really want to stick to Linux. However, I may need to be out-of-home for 12+ hours straight in a day. After some research, it seems people are generally not that impressed with battery life on Linux?
The laptop does not need to do anything heavy duty, as I will remote back into my already very beefy desktop back home.
I guess a common solution to this light use case is M2 MacBook if one wants to completely throw battery concern out of the window. Well… let’s just say it’s a love-hate relationship.
My thinkpads have always gone further on ubuntu than on windaz.
Yeah my x1 carbon thinkpad has great battery life with Linux.
I’ll use power saver in fedora if needed.
Tlp and Intel xtu for undervolting (lowers temps and power consumption, but newer cpus don’t support it) are pretty good ideas. If battery life is your perogative, try avoiding discrete gpus, they can be a pain to make sure they don’t drain battery in Linux. 14hrs is possible, but you have to spec properly (think thinkpad t480 with dual batteries, and a low power display).
Battery life on laptops is always over exaggerated regardless what OS you run.
12+ hours of actual battery life during use just doesn’t happen.
12+ hours of actual usage is doable on Apple Silicon, but it does depend on what your usage is. If you’re compiling something 50% of the time then probably not. If you spend most time writing code and then testing the application after compiling? Yeah it’ll last you 12.
I know that’s not what OP has and it’s not what they should get for Linux usage, but I’ve worked with 3 now (one personal, two at different jobs) and these things are the holy grail of battery life. First day on my M1 Air, taking it off the charger, 2 hours in it had used maybe 5% battery watching a udemy course and playing around in xcode.
So I think we should demand better of our laptops. I do believe AMD has done a lot, they had an entire generation where all they advertised was the increased power efficiency.
This is what’s important. If you don’t enable power saving in some fashion, your hardware will always be “on” at full specs. Even if the machine isn’t actually being used, it’s still powering everything to be ready to jump at any opportunity to process something quickly without ramping down.
TLP has pretty excellent default settings. Simply turning it on will likely make your battery life go 2-3x longer than without it being on, and you will have about 80% of the performance from a UX perspective. And if you want to crunch numbers faster on battery, you can tune TLP or turn it off temporarily.
It depends on the distro and how you configure it.
For distros that just work out of the box like ubuntu or manjaro it should be about the same as windows unless there’s something weird in your laptop, but in general there are 3 really useful tools that I recommend you check out are:
- TLPUI: a user interface for TLP, a power management tool that’s used in most distros. With this you can configure your min/max clock speeds for your CPU and GPU when on battery vs plugged in, CPU governor, display brightness, automatic poweroff of drives and USB devices, and many other things
- throttled (https://github.com/erpalma/throttled): originally created to workaround a BIOS bug on some thinkpads, this can now set things like turbo duration, power limits and undervolting, all based on whether you’re on battery or plugged in
- LACT: if you have an AMD GPU, you can use this to undervolt it or to set a better power limit
Setting these up properly on my thinkpad t480 with manjaro gave it a good 50-60% of extra battery life for what I use it for (I’m a teacher so mostly presentations and various IDEs). You should check them out.
It depends. If you get a fairly standard laptop from a brand that has some Linux awareness (Lenovo, Dell, Framework,…) you should be alright out of the box.
Gaming laptops generally are a bit worse since GPU switching is not as well integrated. I managed to get mine to parity but with a lot of tweaking. Devices with only integrated graphics tend to be fine out of the box.
